Major damage in Napa Valley after quake

1of3A magnitude-6.0 earthquake centered near Napa, Calif., damaged a building in the city's downtown. At least 120 people went to a Napa hospital throughout Sunday with injuries, mostly bumps, cuts and bruises. But three, including a boy hit by chimney debris, were critically hurt.Photo: GLEN CHAPMAN, AFP/Getty Images

2of3Workers clean up bottles that were thrown from the shelves at Van's Liquors in Napa during the quake. The toll on the region's crucial wine and restaurant businesses will take days to calculate, but the evidence was already daunting. Barrels and bottles collapsed in heaps up and down Napa Valley.Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

3of3Firefighters rest while working in a Napa mobile home park that caught fire. The earthquake hit Napa at 3:20 a.m.Photo: JIM WILSON, New York Times

NAPA, Calif. — At 3:19 a.m. Sunday, Napa Valley was still its placid self, the leafy wine capital of America. Silent but for a few night owls, its upscale stores sat locked, the usual weekend rush of tourists still hours away.

That all transformed in less time than it takes to pull a cork.

Six miles away and nearly 7 miles beneath Earth's surface, one of the area's spider webs of earthquake faults woke with a magnitude-6.0 fury at 3:20 a.m. — and when the local shaking stopped about five seconds later, a different Napa emerged.

The quake continued to roll away from the storied wine capital for an additional 10 seconds or so, rattling homes, shattering windows and buckling roads throughout Northern California.

But it was in the heart of wine country where the worst of it hit. Especially in the 78,000-population city of Napa.

For most, the jolting end of sleep is what announced the arrival of the worst earthquake in the Bay Area since 1989's Loma Prieta shaker.

Les Flynn was dozing with his young son on a friend's couch in Napa.

“I threw myself over him,” he said. “It was crazy. Everything was shaking off the walls. The whole house was just rolling.”

Andrea Griego took a hard hit to her leg while struggling to flee out the back door of her house and suffered cuts and bruises.

“It was so scary,” she said. “You couldn't get the door open because everything was shaking.”

In the pre-dawn darkness, it was hard to see the extent of the damage. Neighbors pounded on doors to check on each other and to help turn off gas mains, and the only sounds were the shouts of rescuers, sirens wailing and building security and car alarms blaring.

There was no power for hours, and the only light was from headlights, blinking emergency bulbs and the usual curse that accompanies bad earthquakes — fire.

Just off the famous tourist route of California 29, four homes lit up at the Napa Valley Mobile Home Park, and as terrified residents poured into the streets, they were helpless to put out the blazes while they waited for fire crews.

Ray Kauffman, 68, was one of the first outside. Seeing smoke at one of the mobile home, he ran to his to get his crescent wrench and turn off the gas. It was too late.

“The flames were too much when I got there,” he said.

Firefighters inundated with emergency calls from all around the city rushed to the high-priority fire — but when they got there, the water main was broken, so they could mount only a limited attack with water tankers. The blaze was out by 6 a.m., and while some firefighters did some mop-up, the rest dashed off to help handle the hundreds of crisis scenes throughout town — most of them fortunately not life-threatening.

Napa city Firefighter Jeramy Nelson hit the mobile home blaze with a garden hose while he waited for a tanker line. He said that as crews spread out, they had no idea how extensive the damage in town really was. Initially, many thought it might have been another San Francisco-based quake that shot north.

“I think none of us knew the full scope of it until a couple hours into it,” he said.

Police and fire crews quickly got a grip on the chaos, blocking off dangerous roads and damaged buildings. For many, like Nelson — a 13-year veteran on the force who has worked big disasters all over the state and fought a magnitude-5.2 quake in Napa in 2000 — training and instinct kicked in quickly. His own home was slightly damaged, but that didn't keep him from the emergency lines.

“It's the Bay Area, man. Anything could happen,” he said.

By the time sunrise came and the scenes of wreckage finally emerged in morning light, the full scope of destruction was breathtaking.

Water gushed through the plaster siding at the McCaulou's department store, flooding the inside. The front of the Pfeiffer building on Main Street, the oldest surviving commercial building in Napa, built in 1875, was destroyed, with stones, some 2 feet wide, on the sidewalk below.

After its initial hit in Napa, the quake continued to snake its way throughout the region for nearly 15 total seconds — the same duration as Loma Prieta. Away from wine country, it was mostly described as a rolling wave. But that didn't mean gentle.

Fourteen miles to the south in Vallejo, windows burst or cracked throughout downtown, and several historic buildings on Mare Island were damaged. Erica Gregory was brewing coffee on the graveyard shift at a Shell gas station on California 29 when everything started jumping off the shelves.

“It was nerve-wracking,” she said. “You just have to stand there and take it.”

The 24-hour Napa Valley Casino in nearby American Canyon shook hard just as a set of die-hard gamblers were in middle of a hand of Texas Hold 'Em. They dropped the cards and dashed for their lives.

“I didn't know what to do,” said Sunshine Hamilton, her legs shaking from the ordeal. “Everybody ran outside, so I ran outside, too. No one grabbed chips or anything like that.”

North of Napa in Santa Rosa, Darryl Sismil, owner of Marin Computer Service, described the tremor as “just a rolling sensation. It felt like I was on a boat in the bay.”

The toll on the region's crucial wine and restaurant businesses will take days to calculate, but the evidence was already daunting.

Barrels and bottles collapsed in heaps up and down the valley, pouring rivers of fine wine onto floors and gutters. Among those hit was Smith-Anderson Wine Group, which stores hundreds of barrels, some stacked five or six high, for Stone Hedge and other North Coast wineries. Dozens of the barrels broke open.

Other places such as Amedeo, which stores and ships wine for nearly 200 winery clients, fared better, losing one bottle of wine. Seismically improved storage facilities for the bottles there, as at many other wine companies, helped minimize the damage.

Back in the heart of downtown Napa, hardly a corner of downtown was left untouched. From modern groceries to 19th-century gems including the 1870s courthouse, pieces broke off and shot into the night, randomly hitting whoever happened to be in the vicinity.

The post office suffered shattered windows and a massive crack running diagonally up the side of the building. Several homeless people sleeping inside were showered with debris.

“By the grace of God, I'm alive,” a man who identified himself only as Pablo said in Spanish. “I was sleeping in that corner, and bricks began falling on me.”

For the hordes of tourists in town for wine tastings and sightseeing, the morning was a bracing introduction to the “earthquake country” lore they'd heard so much about. Jennifer and Chuck Tate were staying at the Andaz Hotel, visiting Napa on vacation from Oklahoma.

“It was terrifying. It was violent, very violent,” said Jennifer Tate, who was asleep with her husband in a room on the fifth floor. “We really thought we were going to die. I was just screaming 'God make it stop. Protect us.'”

The couple had their bags packed and were returning to their home in Oklahoma immediately, clipping their visit short by a day.

At least 120 people flooded into Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa throughout the day with injuries, mostly bumps, cuts and bruises. But three, including the boy hit by chimney pieces, were critically injured.

Division Chief Darren Drake of the Napa Fire Department described many of the patients as “walking wounded.”

Steven Smith, 20, a wine cellar worker in Napa, needed several staples in his head and more than a dozen stitches on his left arm. He was sleeping on the floor at a friend's house when a fish tank, which he estimates held up to 26 gallons of water and weighed hundreds of pounds, pitched off its metal stand and landed on top of his head.

“I was in shock,” Smith said. “I didn't know what happened. I felt liquid running down my body, I rubbed my head and noticed I had blood on my hand.”

A local fireman in the area patrolled the neighborhood and helped bandage Smith's head and hand. Neighbors came by to comfort him before a friend drove him to the hospital.